Chapter 7 - W. B. Yeats

Summary

The importance of W.B. Yeats for Heaney’s poetics is great, as Heaney and many others have noted. In addition to this influence of the earlier Irish poet and playwright upon the latter, 'influence' of Heaney upon Yeats also occurs, in the sense that understanding of Yeats, including his position in Irish literary history, has shifted in the wake of strong readings by Heaney. Intertextuality, that is, the interplay between various texts and how they are read, moves in multiple directions, sometimes simultaneously. This chapter proposes a way of looking at both poets through the lens of the other, concluding with a reading of interflowing relationships between two sets of poems: 'The Cold Heaven' (Yeats) and 'Lightenings i' (Heaney), and 'Postscript' (Heaney) and 'The Wild Swans at Coole' (Yeats).